Using the example of Memorial, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental organization, this essay develops the concept of “precarious commons” to describe the continuous and uncertain process of creating an open-access digital resource and maintaining a community around it. In 2022, Memorial became one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long efforts to open official archives, to collect and solicit testimony from survivors and families of victims of Soviet terror, and to promote democratic values and human rights in public life. These activities illustrate precarious cultural commoning: ever threatened by bureaucratic enclosure, political and cultural amnesia, and outright persecution. The organization’s extragovernmental, mostly volunteer-driven work has established an open digital archive of state repressions as well as a vital space for educating a new generation of memory activists and imagining a different collective future.

Book Review| June 01 2018 Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. By Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015; pp. 256. $50.00 cloth. Ekaterina V. Haskins Ekaterina V. Haskins Pennsylvania State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (2): 359–362. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0359 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ekaterina V. Haskins; Making Photography Matter: A Viewer's History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2018; 21 (2): 359–362. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.2.0359 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: BOOK REVIEW You do not currently have access to this content.

Contemporary scholarship has noted Mikhail M. Bakhtin's apparent animosity toward rhetoric. Bakhtin's distinction between monologue and dialogue helps to explain his view of rhetoric, which is both hostile and receptive—hostile to monologic rhetoric but receptive to a dialogic rhetoric that is responsive to others. This article reads Bakhtin's account of monologue and dialogue as a reaction to the pervasive totalitarian visual rhetoric of the Soviet state. Drawing on Bakhtin's descriptions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and various kinds of double-voiced discourse—parody, satire, and polemic—the article analyzes the workings of Soviet visual rhetoric as both monologic and potentially dialogic and recovers the various forms of otherness displaced by this rhetoric.

Abstract The rivalry between Plato and Isocrates has begun to receive scholarly attention, primarily because both Plato and Isocrates used the term philosophia to describe their occupation. However, the efforts to distinguish their respective uses and definitions of the term typically ignore the performative dimension of both Plato's and Isocrates’ writings and their relationship with other discourses of Athenian public culture. This essay argues that both Plato and Isocrates constructed the domain of philosophy by performing the speech genres constitutive of Greek cultural memory. To support this claim, I offer a reading of Plato's Menexenus and Isocrates’ Panegyricus, both of which were crafted in response to the same historical event, the Peace of Antalkidas. The essay demonstrates the distinct ways in which Plato and Isocrates appropriated generic conventions of the Athenian funeral oration and panegyric in order to construct the identity of a “philosopher” vis‐à‐vis his polis and to model the relationship between students of “philosophy” and discourses of their culture.

Abstract This essay argues that the genealogy of the schism between poetics and rhetoric can be understood best by contrasting the attitudes of Plato and Aristotle towards the social impact of the poetic tradition with those of Isocrates. Plato seeks to discipline the process of poetic and political enculturation by splitting mimesis as representation from mimesis as performative imitation and audience identification. Aristotle completes Plato's Utopian project by constructing a hierarchy wherein representational mimesis of the tragic plot in the Poetics is central to a philosophical life, while mimesis as performative imitation of style in the Rhetoric is of marginal utility. In so doing, he counters Isocrates’ performative conception of speech education, according to which identification and performance both activate and sustain one's civic identity.